Nice Steve.

If the movie were good, it would be much more effective in delivering a message. I read somewhere about environmental groups upset about the movie because they're smart enough to realize that a the movie will probably leave people associating climate change discussions with a absurd but boring Hollywood flic that's all marketing and special effects with a formulaic plot and sub-par acting.

"...the onset of a new Ice Age just three days after the polar ice caps melt." Que?
Global warming and an ice age at the same time? Hooray for Hollywood!

"...blow their whole stash on some really killer weed."
You mean they're releasing a remake of "Day of the Triffids" too? Cool.

(Hmm, come to think of it, they could work in an anti-GM line on that one. Maybe I shouldn't give them ideas.)

Thanks for ruining the surprise, Steve.
Wait, the only surprise there is that you didn't have Gore sloppily kissing Tipper at the premier, since they've obviously got only a couple days to live thanks to Bushitler's horrible environmental policies.

Remember when everyone made fun of Dan Quayle for validating policy decisions using "Murphy Brown"?

Yeah.

Go for it guys.

Jane Fonda -- (a former celebrity some of you serious movie buffs might remember) made a couple disaster films like _China Syndrome_ and _Rollover_ that predicted the dire consequences of Saudi Arabians dumping their Treasury bonds or nuclear reactors pouring plutonium into the San Andreas Fault.

These had about as much impact on public policy as that more recent movie James Garner and Tommy Lee Jones made about asteroids slamming into the planet...

Pretty funny (you are kidding, right? - some of this is going to happen).

However, there will be balance! My understanding is that, in order to highlight their determination to confront shadowy foreign threats, the Republicans are staging an event to coincide with the premiere of "Van Helsing".

Great post, Steve - be sure to follow it up in about 6 months.

As long as we can solve the problem with a lone MacIntosh laptop (a la ID4), I'm not too worried.

Product placement will save us all.

Giant hail in Tokyo?

New York flooding and freezing?

New Ice Age?

Ummm, don't the enviroids remember that the Kyoto Protocol was about Global Warming?

Poor Roland Emmerich -- Al Gore will do for his Box Office what he did for Howard Dean's primary campaign. To paraphrase Krusty the Klown:

"the man is ratings death!".

--furious

Didnt Al Gore give a 'global warming speech' on the coldest day in NYC in recorded history?

Is there a scene where Al Gore gets flogged?

I'd just like to know how they are gonna catastrophclly melt the ice caps. Maybe they have devised a Giant microwave satellite to finally be able to scratch Kofi Anan's arse from space and it was misaligned. THis movie, mush like "the Core" makes me fear for our future, not due to environmental atastrophies, but due to sheer stupidity of our youth who have had their brains reamed with schlock. And not the good stuff either. Incidnetally, the MoDo "prediction" was priceless.

You gotta love the quality of the science though. The ice caps melt, ushering in a new ice age, whereby the sea levels rise and then freeze into a new ice cap as far south as New York. *boggle*

Surprisingly, this is a step down accuracy wise from Independence Day. Which is a remarkable achievement in and of itself really. Kudos to them.

The prosperous, quiet, safe Conservative-Rightist worlds of Barry Goldwater and Norman Rockwell - dare also Rockefeller? Reagn-Bush 1? - and, like the ACLU and NOW, belongs to the Clintons and the anti-Republican Republican "Clinton 1990's, while in 2004 Republican Dubya and the arrogant, imperialist, warmonger GOP-US Right gets all the perverts. criminals, sadists, bohemians, gothicists, exhibitionists, and rother related "sick society"/"sick world" issues. If Dubya-GOP can cause MAD COW and SARS and SUNSPOTS, and cause Janet Jackson to be so mentally troubled as to "force" her to expose her nipple in simulated abuse-rape during the SuperBowl, ergo Dubya can obviously cause a 10.5'er as well, just as he was per se responsible for suddenly discovered economic problems in the Y2000 Clinton national economy even though Dubya was still only Governor of Texas! In true Mid-West, blue-collar and family values, exhibitionist Libertarians and BSM alternate lifestylers are for Republicans, not Democrats-Liberals, as honest injun, non-partisan, truth-in-journalism, and USMC true blue as the GAY-LESBIAN MOVEMENT, the WWP/WWPP, and NOW, etc. are traditional or historical supporters of the GOP-Right, God bless 'em!

Those college students should ask Joseph where to get theat Killer Weed.

The sudden onset of a new Ice Age was the crisis du jour for environmentalists in the 1970s. Some of the same people flogging global warming, like Stephen Schneider, then told us this was inescapable. They had evidence too! One year it was repoorted that the snow lay on the ground all sunner in Northern Canada. Temperature data showed the globe had been cooling since the end of the 1800s. Orange trees no longer grew as far north as they did in the 1890s. The computer climate models showed a new ice age. Tjeerd van Andel, a geological oceanographer, thought that anthropogenic global warming might save us from an otherwise catastrophic ice age.

Curiously, these people gave the same policy recommendations for meeting an ice age as they do for meeting global warming: ruin our economy and introduce socialism. I wonder why?

Why don't some of you take an introductory course in geosciences or meteorology before you completely disavow any connection between global warming and ice ages? The post was kind of humorous but some of the comments are so teeming with ignorance it's blinding.

While we're at it, why don't we disband NASA? Didn't anyone see Deep Impact?

"Answer: It's The Passion of the Christ for the anti-globalization crowd."

Umn, no, these people are not anti-globalization (as far as I understand the word). The people who would be engaged by this movie will be the ones who believe that the UN is the answer to all ills - the United States is too powerful, and needs to be subdued by a global government...because US citizens have so much while the people in say - Zimbabwe have so little. The military/industrial/government complex of the US with its economic policy is keeping the rest of the world down and destroying the environment (while kicking puppies, on the way to the office). I think maybe The Passion of the Christ for the "Hate America First" crowd (a.k.a Useful idiots) would be more accurate.

Jbad, while you have a point about the relationship hypothesiszed between global warming (also hypothesized), the usual envriometaloid suspects are using an example of Hollywood-style science to promote two questionable theses: That global warming is indeed occurring now, and if it is occurring now, that it is due chiefly or wholly to anthropogenic causes, and not increased solar activity, for example.

Academic scientific research is chiefly tailored around what grant-giving agencies want to fund. But these agencies are staffed by people who, for better or worse, have their own professional agendas and biases, and hence the problem that the hypotheses advanced in the most fundable research proposals are not necessarily the most scientifically valid ones.

I'm sorry to say that I voted for Al Gore. I've spent every day since Sept 11, 2001, thanking God that I was on the losing side.

The Democrats are right to see this movie as a bandwagon they should jump on. A scary percentage of Americans learn -- if that's the right word -- all they know from Hollywood films written, directed and produced by the Robbins/Beatty clique and its running dogs and useful idiots. (Don't you love how Marxist lingo just keeps renewing itself?)

Great post.

The special effects do look pretty damn cool, though.

While there may be potential connections between "global warming" and the onset of an ice age, there certainly is no connection between the melting of the polar ice caps and the onset of an ice age. That's a mind-bogglingly stupid concept and one that deserves lampooning at every opportunity.

To sum up, ice ages persist because ice has a much higher albedo than land or water, and thus reflects a great proportion of the light and heat from the Sun back into space. It's possible for global warming to foster an ice age by disrupting ocean conveyors and, potentially, by causing increased snowfall (due to increased evaporation over the oceans). But these processes build up the polar ice sheets (which is what you'd expect in an ice age, duh) and lower the global sea level. Melted ice caps would result in much more heat being absorbed by the oceans and land at the poles and would propel the global climate away from an ice age, not toward one. (Eventually, the increased rainfall and consequent rock weathering of a "warm age" would trap more atmospheric CO2 in the ocean and gradually cool the Earth and push it back toward the formation of ice caps again.)

Was that Mediola fellow smoking some of that 70's Killer Weed, or has Global Warming frozen my brain?

Anyway, jbad is right, science can definitely predict both blogal warming and an ice age. I have noticed that for the last month, average temperatures in Seattle have been going up, which clearly indicates Global Warming and at this rate, by late December, Puget Sound will have boiled away and Mt. Rainer will have melted.

Meanwhile, during the same period, the average temperature in Australia has dropped, clearly indicating a coming ice age that will wrap everything south of Ecuador in a glacial blanket.

Some greedy neocons claim this is just part of the Earth's normal yearly cycle, but they're just in it for the oil.

Personally, I really dug Independence Day and the meteor movies. The volcano and twister flicks were fun, too. FUN. As in, distract me, entertain me - I know I'm not learning anything here!

I caught the trailer for this one the other night, and it looks like fun.

Crikey, it's a movie, people. Written by movie-writers, directed by movie-directors, and acted by movie-actors.

Relax; the only ones using it for scientific/political purposes are the Democrats. The rest of us will only go and see it for FUN.

Robin,

I was under the impression that melting ice caps and the resulting change in salination differentials was the source of ocean conveyor disruptions.

Lampoon this, please, for the edification of all:
http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics/abruptclimate_joyce_keigwin.html
During millennial periods of cold climate, North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation either stopped or was seriously reduced. And this has generally followed periods of large freshwater discharge into the northern N. Atlantic caused by rapid melting of glacial or multi-year ice in the Arctic Basin. It is thought that these fresh waters, which have been transported into the regions of deep water formation, have interrupted the conveyor by overcoming the high latitude cooling effect with excessive freshening.

That was precious. As for global warming and ice ages, from our planet's POV its been there, done that, have the book rights.

Seriously, all the hype-laden enviro-eff'ing that a lot of scientists engaged in has created an atmosphere where anyone with a computer and some Excel skills can make a prediction about the "Impending ______ caused by humanity's (misuse/overuse) of ______."

So what's the point of listening to anyone about the environment?

As a fix to my all-too-late-night post above, the weird portion of the first sentance should have read "...between regional temperature decreases and global warming (also hyopthesized),...".

As another aside, if The Day After Tomorrow does indeed depict the onset of an ice age three days after the polar ice caps melt(!) as Drudge is claiming, I'd say it has about as much relevance to meterology as the new Dawn of the Dead has to epidemiology and disaster preparedness. While FEMA, the CDC, and the Red Cross wouldn't be caught dead (or undead, I guess) using the latter movie to promote their respective agendas, Al Gore and a group of environmentalists will be trying to milk the former movie for credibility and importance. It'll likely end up being the movie that milks Gore and the environmentalists, of course, but no matter who milks whom, I think everyone will come out of this with empty pails.

"While there may be potential connections between "global warming" and the onset of an ice age, there certainly is no connection between the melting of the polar ice caps and the onset of an ice age. "

You've got to be kidding. Do you not think that global warming would result in a partial melting of the polar ice caps? That influx of cold water could stop the North Atlantic jet stream, which would have catastrophic effects on climate. Even the Pentagon is investigating this possibility. Like I said, read a geoscience text before you rush to judgment.